Feathered Serpent Ashtray

An individual ashtray worked with a pre-Columbian feathered-serpent design, this piece carries one of Spratling's central ancient subjects onto a small functional object. The feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, was among the most charged images in Mexico's pre-Columbian art, and Spratling typically stylized such serpents so that the pattern of the form, rather than literal representation, carried the design (Morrill, p. 73).

The ashtray belongs to Spratling's first design period, when the Taxco workshop was translating motifs from Mexico's ancient art into forms accessible to a wider audience (Stromberg, p. 27). Here that translation is applied to an everyday object, the serpent worked into the dish itself.

The piece is recorded in Phyllis Goddard's Spratling Silver: A Field Guide. First-period ashtrays carrying pre-Columbian motifs come to market only occasionally.